The Last Rain

by Edeet Ravel

  Dori

  Mummy wakes me up before anyone else is awake. It’s still dark outside.

  I can’t decide whether to take the belt Gilead gave me. I don’t really need a belt but if I don’t take it Gilead will think I don’t like it. In the end I decide to leave it. It’ll be there for me when I come back.

  We go outside to where Daddy is waiting with Sara and David and the suitcases. It’s very quiet on Eldar. Everyone is still sleeping.

  A car comes to take us away. It brings us to a noisy bus station. It’s morning now and there are people everywhere. Mummy tells David to stay on a bench with me and not move while she goes to clarify something.

  There’s an old Arab woman sitting beside us on the bench begging. She makes sad sounds. David has some money in his pocket that Mummy gave him. He says if I could I’d give her all my money. I say yes yes give her all the money! But David shakes his head and says I can’t. He’s right. Mummy gave him the money to take care of.

  Then Mummy comes back and we get up and leave.

  Ballistic Protections Solutions

  Perhaps the most successful kibbutz industry today is Eldar’s ballistic protections solutions. Iraq proved to be a gold mine for the factory as U. S. demand for the product increased. The company now employs more than a thousand workers in Israel and 300 in plants abroad. Its turnover has increased from NIS 1.5 billion last year to 3 billion this year.

  —The International Economist, 2010

  Dori

  In the evening the plants and bushes have a marvellous smell. The darker it gets the more marvellous the smell gets. The sun is starting to set but it’s not dark yet. Soon the Last Rain will fall. We won’t know for sure it’s the Last Rain until it doesn’t rain again. If it doesn’t rain again we’ll look back and say that was the Last Rain.

  Notes

  1. Optional in Kindergarten; if the Group was small, free play under supervision of the Minder continued until Transitional First Grade.

  2. An idea of Utopian communal living, first envisioned by socialist European Jews who settled in Ottoman Palestine in the early 1900s.

  3. From Our First Year, a collective diary of Eldar’s first year, written in English; no author.

  4. The literal meaning of “wig” in Hebrew is “foreign (false) hair” (pe’ah nokhrit); the word for “foreign” is also used for “non-Jew.” In Modern Hebrew, “non-Jew” is the more common meaning, and the only one Dori has encountered.

  5. In 1961, each window served a single Room. Front terraces and curved railings were added in the 1970s; as the kibbutz prospered, walls between individual Rooms were torn down and units were expanded into larger apartments. Below: early stages of construction, 1950.

  6. From Between the Motion and the Act, an autobiographical novel by Naftali Satie (formerly Stavitsky), written in Montreal during a leave from Eldar. “It was supposed to be a four-month leave and I thought at first I could write the book in six months, but I was working full-time and there were the kids and so on, so in the end I needed a year and a half. I was very happy with Vantage Editions. They did an excellent job—they produced a high-quality book, and they sent out review copies and did promotion just like any other publisher. I had a choice: paperback, which falls apart very quickly, or hardback, which lasts forever. I chose hardback. I had to stay in Canada an extra three months after Varda and the kids went back, to earn the $1,200. Paperback would have taken two months—not much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. At the end of December, Varda went back to the kibbutz and I sublet our place on Davaar Street and moved in with my parents. I took a job as a shipper—it involved a lot of lifting and wrecked my back, but it paid well.”

  —Interview with Naftali Satie

  7. Heb. metapelet (f). Unique kibbutz usage; no equivalent in English; refers to the childcare worker in charge of a Group. The word came to mean, in the 1970s, counselling psychologist/psychiatrist—see B’Tipul, the award-winning Israeli TV drama adapted by HBO in the USA as In Treatment. In general usage, the root verb means “looking after” and, as in English, has a wide range of connotations, from benevolent to sinister. I’ve always associated the word metapelet with refuse drifting on drainage water—orange peels, for example; or with something bloated abandoned in an alleyway; I can’t say the word, can hardly bear to hear it spoken or even see it printed, especially in English transliteration, on a page.

  8.

  In kibbutz usage, “Group” (kvutzah) refers to a group of boys and girls, close in age, who live together in a Children’s House. Above, Dori’s Group in the Baby House; Dori to the far right. Below, a few months later.

  9. Modern Hebrew for “hoe”; borrowed from Arabic.

  10. Small crouton-like puffs produced by Osem and, as far as I know, unique to Israel; made of flour, oil, and spices. Highly addictive.

  11. Hebrew is an inflected language, and five of the six words that entertain Dori and Lulu rhyme: sinorim nir’im matzh.ikim al anashim agulim.

  12. Interview with the curator, from John R. Snarey, “Becoming a kibbutz founder: An ethnographic study of the first all-American kibbutz in Israel,” Jewish Social Studies 46:2 (1984:Spring) © Indiana University Press.

  13. Possibly this was Shoshana’s chance to nibble choice items. She carried meals from the Kitchen to the Children’s House on a milkmaid’s yoke, three metal containers hanging from either side. We remember the secretiveness and concentration of her turned back at the counter, as she unloaded and distributed the food. In a diary written shortly after my twelfth birthday, I found the following entry: Shoshana used to go down and come back with food. You had to go down a few steps and walk a great deal from our quarters to the dining room and it must have been pretty hard on Shoshana. But through all her hardships, and probably because of them, she was … —but let us leave that to later.

  14. Written in 1967 by Varda Satie (née Klein); b. 1927, Montreal, Canada. “The main character in the play is single. I was already married on the kibbutz. I met Naftali at the local [Montreal] branch of Shomer [Young Guard Youth Movement] when I was fourteen. He was four years older than me and had just volunteered for the army. I had a huge crush on him—he was famous for having Paul Newman eyes, ‘bedroom eyes’ we used to call it. All the girls had a crush on him. I gathered my courage and asked if I could write to him in the army. He said he’d be flattered to receive letters from such a pretty girl, but we only got to know each other later, on his leaves and through letters. He wrote me over a thousand letters from his base. I know because I numbered them. I don’t know where the letters are now; they were lost. He wrote to me just about every day—long, beautiful letters.* It was always a thrill, getting those envelopes in the mail. Naftali was lonely in the army, and bored. He asked to go overseas, but they needed him at Gander [in Newfoundland]. All his friends from Shomer were overseas, but the army wouldn’t send him. He used to tell me what books to read and what to look for in the books—he was educating me. At first he signed his letters ‘with impending love’—he was always a stickler about language. Then he began leaving out the ‘impending’ and one day he signed ‘your impending husband.’ He applied for leave to get married, but soldiers couldn’t get leave from Newfoundland very easily, it was too far. He had to wait until the war was over.

  “Even then he wasn’t released right away, but he was finally given leave in June and we got married. I was seventeen, almost eighteen. I moved in with his parents—I was in teacher’s college by then. He returned to the base for a few more months, and when he came back we began preparing to emigrate to Palestine. We didn’t sail until 1948—I had to finish my studies and then we had to go to the Shomer farm in Highstown, New Jersey, to get hakhshara [training]. On the ship to Palestine, or Israel as it was by then, we suddenly heard Arabic on the radio, and all the women began to cry. It hit us how far we were from home. On our first night in Haifa we were given a room with straw mattresses on the floor. Martin found a bottle of whiskey in the port and I
got quite high. I stood on the table and sang ‘Bei Mir Bist du Schoen.’ No one ever forgot that.”

  —Interview with Varda Satie

  * From Nafatli Satie’s unpublished memoir fragments:

  In the army I found an enormous amount of free time and to my happy astonishment, well-stocked libraries almost everywhere I was stationed. I first arrived on the mid-Atlantic RCAF station in Newfoundland in late summer 1942. I resumed my prolific correspondence with about a dozen individuals, including my family, Movement friends and, of course, Varda. When I enlisted, my knowledge as journeyman electrician may have saved my life. Try as I might to transfer out to a frontline unit to gain experience that might be useful in Palestine, I was consistently rejected; experienced electricians were in short supply.

  One day I received orders to report to the station’s legal officer. I entered Captain Solomon’s office and, as required, saluted. The fair, balding officer looked up from his desk, smiled sweetly and motioned for me to sit down. His motion as much as said, let’s dispense with all these absurd formalities.

  “You may be wondering why I asked you here. It’s your letters. You probably realize that the officers here come from diverse backgrounds and some of them react very graphically, I mean orally and very publicly, to some of the contents of your letters. In other words, Leading Aircraftsman Stavitsky, you’ve become quite a celebrity in the officers’ mess.”

  I felt the blood rush to my head. But it was a good feeling. I got them to think, I made them uncomfortable.

  “So what’s the problem, sir?” I asked.

  “Do you mind if give you some advice?” Solomon looked kind and affable.

  “Nossir.”

  “Well, can you cut down on your, er, romantic terms? Yes, your romantic terms and your political views?” There was a hint of regret in his voice.

  “Nossir, I cannot. I don’t see why I should. This war is being fought for the preservation of democracy and freedom, I thought.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Solomon responded quickly. “Those political pronouncements. And Jewish issues. Against the British. It’s embarrassing for me and the two other Jewish officers.”

  “I’m sorry about that, sir, but it’s my right and privilege to write what I want.”

  Solomon suggested I bring my mail directly to him from then on. That system worked until he was transferred. I again deposited my mail in the regular post office. Two weeks passed and I was required to report to Major Susan Musgrove, Commanding Officer of the Women’s Division. On her desk lay a letter written in Yiddish.

  “What language is that, LAC Stavitsky?”

  “Yiddish, ma’am.”

  “How am I supposed to understand that?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “Well, you can’t write in a language that no one can read.”

  The deep frown never left her rather handsome middle-aged face.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but what do you think I write to my parents that requires censorship?” I experienced a debilitating sense of frustration.

  “I don’t care what you write to your parents as long as it’s in English.”

  “What about French?”

  “Don’t be snarky, Airman,” she shot back in apparent anger.

  “My parents can only read Yiddish and I believe it’s my privilege to write to them.”

  “LAC Stavitsky, this interview is terminated. French or English.”

  I went directly, letter in hand, to the Catholic padre. He was a red-faced jovial-looking man. When he heard the story his round face crinkled and he laughed. “Bring me your letters. Promise me that you will not include any military information. Directly, or in any other way.”

  The padre subsequently was also transferred and once again my letters went straight to the post box.

  Knowing that the officers were discussing my letters, the letters became, in part, didactic. I described in detail to Varda the activities of the Women’s Division, the proliferation of pubic lice amongst the airmen. I reported on anti-Semitism on the base and in the world at large. I criticized the deplorable policies of the British in Palestine and reviewed the books I had read. In short I had a captive audience and I did my best to score points.

  Some weeks later my name again appeared on the Daily Routine orders to report to the medical officer.

  The doctor was a very short pudgy man with a boxer’s face. His name could have been Jewish, but he was a Toronto

  Presbyterian. He politely asked me to sit and relax. I sat and waited. Finally he spoke.

  “I censored your letter last night in the officers’ mess. I was intrigued by your comment on Arthur Koestler’s Arrival and Departure. Can I borrow it?”

  I brought him the book and subsequently, at his request, all my mail.

  “I won’t read your letters, but you must be aware that they arouse some pretty wild reaction in the mess. You will be well-advised to bring me your mail.”

  It seemed obvious to me that the doctor was lying. Not only did he want to read my letters, he wanted to discuss them. At first I felt inhibited, but then, conversely, I experienced a sort of exhilaration. “He wants excitement, this doctor, I’ll damn well give it to him.” At one of our meetings, always pleasant—the batman served tea and wonderful pastry—the doctor made a startling statement. “You want a discharge, I can get it for you.”

  “Why do you think I want a discharge?”

  “Because you hate it here.”

  “But you also know, I’m sure, that I’ve been requesting transfers to an aircraft carrier, far cry from a discharge.”

  “From your letters, the message I get is that you want out.” “What kind of discharge do you have in mind?”

  “On mental grounds.”

  “You must be kidding, Doctor. Thanks, but no thanks.”

  About a month later, I arrived to deliver my mail. This time the batman was absent and the doctor himself ushered me in. He was wearing only underwear. Instead of the batman, the doctor himself served tea, waddling around, his rather sizable posterior appearing to be doing its own separate exercises. The talk, in reference to some book, turned to sex. The doctor asked, “Do you have any 69 experience?”

  I stared somewhat blankly at him. I had absolutely no idea what the man was talking about. The doctor, realizing his faux pas, abruptly stood up, cup in hand, and dismissed me. I deposited my next letters in the mailbox.

  Weeks later I was again summoned to the doctor. I assumed he would request that I resume bringing my mail to him. However the doctor greeted me in full dress, his brass buttons and bars glistening.

  “I’ve been transferred, and before I leave I wanted to thank you for the pleasure being your friend was for me and here is a little token of my esteem.” He handed me a small flat box, neatly wrapped. I thanked him for the gift, and for the time he had spent censoring my letters.

  “Perhaps when this is all over you can look me up,” the doctor responded. We shook hands.

  Back in the barracks I unwrapped the gift and found a very fine leather wallet with the doctor’s name engraved in gold.

  One more mail incident occurred. This time the order to report was to the Chief Provost, the top man in the Military Police establishment on the station. This was apparently serious business and I was far more apprehensive than on previous occasions.

  Outside the office I was immediately treated as a prisoner. The sergeant-at-arms asked me to surrender my hat and belt and marched me into the Provost’s office. The Provost had a magazine open on his desk. He dismissed the sergeant and kept me standing at attention in front of his desk. He looked up. “Do you really read this shit?”

  I inhaled deeply and relaxed. If this was about reading, no problem.

  “I don’t know what you’re referring to, sir.”

  “This piece of shit.” He lifted the journal so that I could identify its name: Youth Horizons.

  “Yes, sir, I do read it.”

  “Do y
ou agree with what’s written?” The Provost glared hatefully.

  “Generally I do. Yessir.”

  “Do you agree with this?” He again held up the magazine

  to display an article entitled ‘The Death of Lord Moyne.’”

  “Well, sir, I don’t know. I haven’t been able to read it yet since you have it here.”

  “None of your shit now, Airman! I don’t know whether I should give this to you.” His British accent was getting thicker.

  “This is a Zionist magazine, sir. It’s against Hitler.”

  “This Stern gang here, Zionists too, no? And they murdered a British diplomat. In cold blood. Stavitsky, you’re dismissed. I can’t stand the sight of you. I pity you. Here, take this piece of fuckin’ shit.”